Back on the road in rural Ireland

Twenty years after his death, audience and academic interest in Samuel Beckett has not waned. A first volume of his letters has just been published, a star-studded production of Waiting for Godot is currently touring the UK and Endgame has been touring Ireland, on its way to London [1]. The author caught up with it and its remarkable star, Henry Woolf, one recent night in the Wicklow mountains, south of Dublin, and heard tell of a long tradition

par Colin Murphy,
mars 2009

In the small, poorly heated kitchen of an old community hall, high in the Wicklow hills, a veteran actor is remembering. “It all started with Anew McMaster, 52 years ago.”

Seventy-nine years old now, the actor Henry Woolf last toured Ireland in 1957, with the legendary “fit-up” (as the travelling theatre companies were then known) of Anew McMaster. McMaster was the last of a breed : the actor-manager of the most famous fit-up in Ireland, who spurned a conventional career on the main stages of London for a lifetime bringing theatre to small country towns.

Henry Woolf went on to grander things : he worked with Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier and Peter Brook. (He met his wife in the cast of Brook’s landmark 1964 production Marat/Sade.) But for now, he is back on the road in rural Ireland. Tonight, having played Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame for an audience of 40 or so, in a production by the Godot Company, he will take my arm as we negotiate the ice on the road to the pub, and then retire to his room in a nearby bed and breakfast. Tomorrow, he and the small cast will drive across the country to Sligo, and then south to Galway, and further south to Cork, and on and on.

Henry Woolf in ‘Endgame’

Does he ever think, I wonder, that at 79, he might be above, or beyond, playing out-of-the-way venues on an arduous tour of Ireland ? “No, no. Never ! I don’t care tuppence about where I do it. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do it.”

The tour of Ireland with Anew McMaster, in 1957, was his first professional acting job. It was not a prestigious one. “He had a very strict rule for employment – he hired whoever would accept the least money. So the quality of the company was, how shall we say, uneven.”

The schedule was extraordinarily intense. They performed in repertory, rehearsing new plays by day while performing at night. “We did eight different Shakespeare plays a week, and then on Sundays, we’d put on a murder mystery or a romance or something. But people seemed to like the Shakespeare best.”

They toured to villages and small towns mostly, playing in town halls, schools, and occasionally in theatres. They would arrive at a venue on the day of a performance, “not unlike the circus coming to town”. Everybody would pitch in, putting up the set and lights and curtains.

“I was astonished at the response to Shakespeare. There was a natural feeling for language. It was a natural place for theatre. They totally accepted, hook, line and sinker, the dramatic power of Shakespeare. The audience was more like an Elizabethan audience : they would talk and add in things, like ‘Did you see what happened to that poor fellow ?’ or ‘Would you take that, Pat ?’”

‘We couldn’t make head nor tail of it’

Indeed, the audiences preferred Shakespeare to the murder mysteries. One man said to him once : “We can understand the language of the Shakespeare, Sir, but this murder mystery, we couldn’t make head nor tail of it, with the bodies falling out of the cupboards and the noises in the back and the poisonings and the shootings.” He went on, talking about Hamlet : “And sure, haven’t we all got young fellows like that at home.”

As a junior member of the company, Woolf often doubled as Assistant Stage Manager (ASM). “I was the worst ASM in the world. In those days, the sound cues would be on vinyl records, but I often couldn’t see the bloody groove. And so instead of putting on ‘The carriage arriving’, I’d put on, ‘The first day of the Somme offensive’. I’d have the Titanic approaching, instead of the Romans arriving. Afterwards I’d get severely bollocked for having ruined about 14 cues.”

One of his first roles was as the clown, Launcelot Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice, with Anew McMaster playing the lead, Shylock. “He said to me, ‘Do what you like behind my back, lad, every laugh’s worth half a crown’.” (He goes into a deep, quavering, upper-class voice for McMaster, then snaps back into his own voice with a cackle.)

McMaster then cast him as the Fool in King Lear. “That was a great compliment. I was so carried away with it I decided to shave my eyebrows off, to give me that ‘fool’ look. Thank God, they grew back.”

But McMaster could be a provocative, as well as populist, director. Woolf remembers how he approached the scene in King Lear where Gloucester’s eye is gouged out by Cornwall. “The scene is so horrible it’s usually done with Gloucester facing upstage, so you don’t see the horror of it. Mac said, ‘No ! We’re not going to be namby pamby. He’s going to be facing downstage.’

“Cornwall had a blood capsule and a grape concealed in his hand. He’d plunge his thumb into Gloucester’s eye, facing the audience, and press the blood capsule, and a terrible gout of blood would spout out of the eye. Then he’d wriggle it around and throw the grape on the floor and squish it, with a terrible ‘squish !’.

“At one convent school we were playing in, three nuns fainted in the front row. ‘Mac !’ we said, ‘three nuns have fainted, do you think we ought to stop the play ?’ But he said, ‘No, no. They enjoy suffering.’ And we went on with the play. Ha ha !”

Barefoot beggars in Dublin

It was a poor Ireland that Woolf arrived in, in 1957. “I was amazed to see barefoot beggars in the streets of Dublin. When there wasn’t a bed and breakfast in the village, they would stay as paying guests in a local house. I was astonished, and embarrassed, to be at a table as the guest in a house, and I’d be the only person eating meat at the table. Everybody else would be eating potato.”

Anew McMaster was one of the last of a breed, the actor-managers : “they take the profits, they take the losses, the play the lead, they’re centre stage.” On a recent (and excellent) RTÉ documentary, Anew McMaster : A Theatrical Life, McMaster emerges as a literally extraordinary figure, as if occupying a different world to that around him : towering, intense and, by today’s standards, impossibly theatrical.

Henry Woolf and cast members of ‘Endgame’

“He had a superb voice, and very tall striking figure, and he didn’t have any inhibitions,” says Woolf. “He acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world for someone to act. It wasn’t ham ; it wasn’t melodrama. If there was a height to be scaled, he would do it. He didn’t know much about the ‘Method’, or all these dogmas ; he was a natural man, who felt things, very strongly.”

“Little did I realise,” says Woolf (who has the stage presence, voice and barrel chest of a man 15 or 20 years younger), “I was taking part in something that would disappear for ever. It was a wonderful thing, a missionary thing, bringing great plays to fairly remote areas. A bit like tonight.”

Outside Conary Community Hall, on a crossroads above Avoca, in Wicklow, it is a crystal-clear, icy night, as the audience trails out after the performance. “To come out and look at the trees and the moonlight – what theatre in the world would give you that ?” asks Michael O’Sullivan.

So what did he make of Endgame ? “Gallows humour,” he says. What did it say to him ? “Enjoy life while you have it !” His wife, Eileen, is less taken with the play ; she says Beckett is too bleak for her, she doesn’t want to be interviewed. Yet, as her husband talks, she constantly interrupts, teasing out points and talking about the role of this small theatre in the rural community around. “We have Beckett up here in a little school hall like that, and we go home and talk about it all night,” she says, and clearly that is true.

So perhaps Henry Woolf was wrong : it didn’t disappear forever. Meanwhile in the hills of Wicklow, Anew McMaster’s spirit lives on – at least as long as there are actors who remember him, and audiences hungry for theatre on a cold night.

P.-S.

LMD English edition Exclusive

Colin Murphy is a journalist based in Dublin

[1] The Godot Company production of Endgame is at the Cockpit Theatre in London from 4 April for a short run. Waiting for Godot is touring the UK from 5 March, and is at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, from 30 April. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol 1, 1929–1940, (ed) Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, is published by Cambridge University Press, 2009